What I Felt Then I Feel Now:

Language Makes Culture, And We Make A Rotten Culture When We Abuse Words.

Nothing Is So Awesomely Unfamiliar As The Familiar That Discloses Itself At The End Of A Journey. Nothing Shakes The Heart So Much As Meeting-far, Far Away-what You Last Met At Home.

What's Impossible Not To Notice, Though - It's All Around Us - Is The Diminution Of American Prose: How Pedestrian It Has Become. Pick Up Any Short Story And Listen To Its Voice, The Tedious Easy Vernacular That Mistakes Transcription For Realism. This Would Display An Understandable Pragmatism If It Were A Pandering To Common-denominator Readers; But It Is, In Fact, A Kind Of Hifalultin Literary Ideology, The Less-is-more Hemingway Legacy Put Through An Up-to-the-minute Industrial Blender.

Novels Are Routinely Denigrated When Characters Are Not Found To Be Likable. Is Raskolnikov Likable? Is King Lear? The Plethora Of Such Naive Readers Testifies To A Failure Of Imagination - The Capacity To See Into Unfamiliar Lives, Motives, Feelings - And This Failure Must, At Least In Part, Be The Failure Of The Teaching Of Literature In The Schools.

Fiction Does Not Invent Out Of A Vacuum, But It Invents; And What It Invents Is, First, The Fabric And Cadence Of Language, And Then A Slant Of Idea That Sails Out Of These As A Fin Lifts From The Sea.